In this episode of the Impact Podcast Innov8social founder talks to Shruti Goel, the Regional Manager of Sankalp Forum, an Intellecap initiative. Shruti is responsible for expanding Sankalp Forum in India & South Asia and ensure value creation for social enterprises and the ecosystem at large.

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Meet Shruti Goel

Shruti has a bachelor degree in Social Work from Delhi university working with social agencies like the UN. She did her Masters degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), from Mumbai working on urban development issues. Shruti is working on social impact space for quite some time, and now she is working mainly on public & rural health issues. Shruti has more than 8 years’ experience in managing Business Development and partnerships for large social sector organisations.

In India, the working relation between private and public sector has been very interesting for Shruti and her team. When Shruti started her journey in social impact space, it was seen as more of philanthropy and social good, but that has slowly changed itself into an interesting entrepreneurial space with maximized social impact. Shruti is now looking at a whole new world, with capital needs, networking needs, technology needs, contextualizing across geographies.

She was amazed by entrepreneurial spirit, which was present even at the street level shops in Gujarat. The same kind of spirit existed with the rural doctors who managed their workload and patient health, this where Shruti found that social enterprise initiative will help to maximize social impact. So the Sankalp Intellecap Initiative was born, it aims to influence the global inclusive development discourse through its work with entrepreneurs, impact investors and inclusive businesses in developing markets.

Social Entrepreneurship Programs

Shruti feels that though, Social Entrepreneurship courses are growing in India, they are not in the same rate as in the US. There are a lot of business schools in India, who provide a two years course in Social Entrepreneurship. Shruti also noticed that, there are a lot of certification programs available both on-campus and online. In Sankalp recently, they had a wonderful session, about these programs and how well these institutions equipped to provide courses on Social Entrepreneurship.

Intellecap

Intellecap essentially started as an advisory firm, to address Capital deficit. The founder of Avishkar Venture funds, Vineet Roy found problems due to capital deficit, while working with rural entrepreneurs. So he started Avishkar funds, which helped with the funding. But soon they realised that it is the support and knowledge, which is missing rather than funding. He wanted to have ecosystem which could propel social entrepreneurship, and that is how Intellecap was born. Intellecap advisory services, acts as a knowledge and advisory system for the entire ecosystem.

Intellecap has a product for each stage of social entrepreneurship. They have a product called “startup wave” which handles the inception of the program, it is a virtual incubation program. If it is a growth stage enterprise, they have I3N network, which is a network of investors. They also have consulting group which provides consulting services. There is also Intellecash which helps small retailers set up shops in cities. They also have micro finance company in east India. With all these, initiatives they wanted to have a platform to connect and enrich the knowledge, resulting in formation of Sankalp.

Sankalp is a platform for the investors and entrepreneurs to connect, it started with some 200 odd people. But in the next 8 years of its creation, it gathered a lot of interest among donors, banks, investors who wanted explore the space. Sankalp also ventured into Africa and Indonesia. The Sankalp 2015 summit saw more than 1500 people attending the event, and in the last two years there are more players in the ecosystem pushing them to be competitive. The event and the platform is getting curated day by day, and there are more specific events for an array of audience. Shruti also feels the numbers may not be only KPI, but they essentially reflect how they are performing.

Measuring Impact

At Sankalp they do focus on measuring the impact that each entrepreneur is able to achieve, as there is an increase investor focus on impact measurement. They have a tool called Prism which helps to measure the impact. It helps to contextualize impact based the area, region and the extent of the impact. This information helps the investor to better focus on their investments. It is an online tool, which is developed specifically for equity investing.